Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday November 18, 2000 @10:29PM
from the guess-that-cuts-out-lemonadestand.biz-for-a-bit dept.

Kyle writes: "According to this story on Wired, most of the new TLDs selected by ICANN will be restricted. For example, .biz will sport a $2000 price tag with an annual $150 fee, and will be limited to verifiable, legitimate businesses with specific commercial intent. The .pro TLD will be used exclusively by certified "professionals," including doctors, lawyers, etc. If the point is to introduce competition for .com, ICANN might have missed the target. Might this exclusivity limit the popularity of new domains? If almost no one is allowed to use them, the general consumer will likely be unaware that they exist, and continue in their .com'ocentric mindset." Problem is, who says what's bona fide? Would officious rules like this allow eccentric, personal Web-museums (like the online LED Museum) into.museum?

It sounds to me like this is yet another attempt to strongarm the internet into playing by "the mainstream"'s rules, by pushing back the hoi polloi who can't make it into some archaic conception of "respectable".

It's just another form of stealth censorship, and it will be just as ineffective as all the other attempts.

The old saying that the internet routes around censorship as a form of damage only has half the picture. The internet isn't vulnerable to this crap, because there is no internet - there are just people, and computers, and the technology to connect them together.

Best solution: ignore the silly buggers. This childish manipulation is too trivial to bother over.

I know it's not the main focus of the article, but the second page [wired.com] of the article mentioned that the new domains (at least.info and.coop) will be managed by new registry providers (.info: Register.com [register.com], Tucows.com [opensrs.org], and.coop: CORE [corenic.org]). Even thought the new domains aren't nearly as desirable as the old standbys, at least Network Solutions doesn't have a strangle-hold on the registry market anymore.

The agenda behind.porn is to put unpopular speech in an internet ghetto, where it can more easily be censored. If this sounds paranoid, read the recent Slashdot discussion [slashdot.org].

That, and it would be so exceptionally easy to add to existing filtering software... If it's blah.porn, you can't go there with the filter
active...
Exactly. Now what makes you think filtering is always voluntary and will always be voluntary? Also,.porn would have been a global institution, with no room for individual, local, or cultural latitude like PICS has. According to whose cultural definition would it have to be porn?

For a summary of my own fascinating opinions, see this post [slashdot.org].

Yeah,.biz has a schlocky feel to it... I'm surprised that we're not seeing something like ".corp" or ".inc" instead.

But here's a stupid question:

Why do we need TLDs at all? Do they serve any real purpose in routing? Certainly they no longer specify the type of entity that they address (hmm... maybe we need ".squat"). Why can't www.sun.com just be www.sun? Is it because they're the dot in dot-com? Jeez... just define a valid character set and a maximum length, and go nuts!

Since I began using this network in 1986 I've always seen the spirit of the network as cooperation not one-upmanship. But yes, there has been a.biz (one of ICANN's choices) since the mid 90's and registrations are being accepted in that tld. To go ahead and create now a.museum just to collide with ICANN's choice would not be proper IMH.

You're quite right it IS (or rather WAS) a typo. The only reason nobody caught it was because it wasn't a typo in the root zone it was a type in my in-addr.arpa zone for 199.166.24. Moreso, since 199.166.24.1 has multiple A records pointing to it and mutiple PTR records (yes, it's legal, really, see RFC 2181) it never affected the operation of the root zone.

Thanks muchly for catching this, I fixed it as soon as I read this. I have long hoped the/. community would in a sense become a part of the alternative root movement. Maybe this is one small step:-)

Until recently, Canada had the solution for what ail's the.com. Unlike registering a.com name, registering a.ca name took more than cash.

The first rule was that a single entity could only have one domain name. Furthermore, that domain name had to be clearly related to your business/organisation, and as specific as possible to avoid confusion without being too hard to remember. In other words if I owned The Happy Burger Shop, I couldn't register Pepsi.ca. That obviously has nothing to do with my organisation, and I probably would be able to register Burger.ca. I'd probably have to go with HappyBurger.ca.

Furthermore, in order to register a.ca I'd have to represent a national organisation. (In other words, my business would have to be incorporated federally). If I was incorporated provincially, I could have HappyBurger.bc.ca if I was located in British Columbia. That was in the event that my domain name was also the name of another organisation in another province, (unlikely, but possible), they could have the domain name for that area.

The advantages of this system are clear. Cybersquating becomes difficult if not impossible, and the system didn't favour those with cash. Like when mailbank.com decided to register thousands of last names and resell them. They aren't creating wealth there, they're just trying to create another middleman. Something the consumer doesn't need, and the internet should do away with.

Unfortunately, someone at the.ca organisation decided to try and make money by copying the.com system. The result is going to be what has happened to the.com. Favoritism to large corporations and lawsuits where the the group with the most cash wins. There are enough "open" tld's. Why trash all of them?

IBM has spent 2 years of it's $60M a year Washnigton DC lobbying budget on ICANN to see there are no new TLDs to protect it's trademarks. If there is to be any progress in namespace expansion in the DNS it will have to come from a grassroots effort. You're waiting till IBM legitimzes this? Now whose being naive?

The smithsonian institution uses "si.edu". Arguably, the smithsonian institution is educational, even though it does not fit into the "four year institution" category. The smithsonian tropical research center, for instance, supports academic research.

InsuranceFactory.edu is pure abuse. So is clue.edu. I think someone needs to start purging the *.edu tld.

with no public representation, how can we even pretend to be surprised? as a few other/.ers have pointed out, there are plenty of companies who don't view $150 x 15 as even remotely cumbersome. on the other hand, it's some serious loot for the people who do this - registrars who (gasp) were represented.

there is not one iota of usefulness in this aside from making money. none. zero. nada. all the more reason to look at the current alternatives and maybe...oh, i dunno, doing something about them. we are, after all, the ones who have the system by the short-n-curlies. if it wasn't for our sneaking linux in to the point where people realized it's viability and dare i say "superiority" (call me a zealot, i am), then where would it be? in the hands of hobbyists and dreamers, where alternate dns is now.

sorry, i'm just ranting. again, slashdot does a lot of whining and yet creates no mechanism to fight.

The whole point to this icann opening up new domains is to relieve the current shortage in easy-to-remember domain names.

Well if that's the purpose, why are these morons putting Network Solutions, Register.com, and other big registrars on their boards to make these decisions? It's like trusting the FBI to investigate themselves! It just doesn't work like that! They have ulterior motives and will only work to further themselves and prevent themselves from losing future profits. It doesn't benefit us consumers, and it sure doesn't benefit the thousands of businesses that would like to find an alternative to the current.com namespace.

Case in point:.museum???!!!?! First of all, who'd even want to type those 6 extra letters. Second, why museum and not car dealerships, or libraries, or malls, or gardens? Geez... how many museums are there in the world anyways? Dumb fucks!

$2000 to register.biz? Not many frickin idiots are going to ante up this ransom, which means this.biz will be about 1/100th as popular as.net is today! Great job register.com and nsi. Yeah that'll keep your current monopolies safe right?

.web should've made it into the new tlds. Yeah Image Online is doing bad business encouraging people to "pre"-register, but so what? Delegate it to another bidder then!

Lets face it,.com is the defacto standard for the internet, and a lot of people don't know that there is anything else. And these are the valuable domains (and this is the reason that.biz) will fail, some of which have sold for absolute fortunes. So a couple of thousand is cheap compared to that. Its all about choice really.

And there is no point in having a new domain if there are no rules attached to it, otherwise you may as well just have the domains.com1,.com2 etc as the.com domain fills up because people register whatever they want. The definition of the domain and the enforcement of it will probably dictate the success or otherwise of it.

It is a Good Idea(tm) to let only legitimate businesses willing to pay $2000 for one or two domain names, and not squatters collecting hundreds of these, register domain names under ".biz". In fact, it will most certainly unclutter the namespace sufficiently that the $1,000,000 price tags that some companies are now paying said squatters are a thing of the past.

But ".biz" is an incredibly stupid TLD. Imagine "sun.biz", "cisco.biz", etc. If anyting, it will only attract spammers, like flies. I.e. "direct marketing" organizations, and their ilk.

As a side note, the problem with inability to deal with squatting of ".com" (.net,.org) addresses has to do with several registrars handling these. Competition for domain name registration is Good, but no single TLD should be in the hands of more than one registrar. Why? Because they will compete for customers by lowering their prices - if one entity managed it they could actually increase the prices for registration based on the current shortage.

Specific criterias for each TLD is Good. ".org" should be reserved for certified non-profit organizations (not per a specific government's tax rules, but per the registrar's rules). ".net" should be reserved for network service providers. ".pro" for professionals. A valid trademark for ".com". ".nothing" for domain name squatters.

Price competition within a single TLD is Bad. Squatters can buy hundreds of domain names easily, then resell them at astronomical prices. They would not buy hundreds of $2000 names, but a legitimate business would.

Stupid TLDs are bad. The price tag of $50000 for a TLD application filtered out common sense, and left only money left to speak. Bad idea.

Because freelance creation of new namespaces without centralized consensus and authority threatens the global uniqueness of the domain name system?

I'm no ICANN advocate, but it's not hard not to see registries of wildcat TLDs as fundamentally different from those guys who sell property on the moon. Hey, guess what, I'll sell.biz, too, won't that be great!

The first signs of a fractured global namespace are already beginning to show; see the recent disputes about registering Chinese character domains... It's not going to be good for anyone.

The registree would decide. If I were a porn pushed, I'd LOVE to get ahold of sex.sex before my competition. Think of all the other combinations.
hot.sex
wild.sex
wet.sex
gay.sex
lesbian.sex
rubber.sex
animal.sex
slashdot.sex (Nudity for Nerds, Sex that matters)
Cybersquatters would probably kill for that last one.;)

Agreed. If you survey the DNS landscape it's easy to see the trend is away from 3rd and fourth level domains as the point of regstration. Ireland as well as Canada just dumped this silly ass idea; there are others but I don't remember them off the top of my head.

Whatever happened to our good old democratic Requests For Comments? It would seem to me that if an organization was going to make a decision that would affect oh, I don't know, hundreds of millions of people, that could either foster or wither certain amounts of intellectual and commercial growth, and that WILL NOT BE REVERSABLE (you can't go back after 5 millions.biz and.pro domains have been registered), that they would perhaps ask people for their opinion? In the past, when the Internet wasn't run by corporations, there was a public discussion when anything new was to be added. Email protocols, html tags, TCP/IP specifications were all publicly discussed, so that everybody could point out the bad points and good points of what was going on. These tlds were developed in a vacuum, and because of that they are going to be terrible and underused.

Now that is a GOOD idea. I'd like to see porn stamped out personally, (Well at least stamped out of my inbox), but seriously there is no way that is EVER going to happen. So let's find a way to deal with it.

Now it's already been said that this will make it easier to filter, but that filtering might not always be voluntary, but frankly I think that's a stupid argument.

Obviously not every porn site is going to rush to.porn, but the existence of such a tld would do much (if explained properly) to satisfy concerned parents. (Not every one, but some at least).

People with 8 yr olds who cruise the net have a legitimate complaint. If current filtering solutions suck, and open source is so great, let's make an open source (including the blacklist obviously) piece of censorware.

If you want to look at it another way, isn't browsing at +1 a filtering/censoring system? Of course it's voluntary and it's open source in the sense that I know how comments are moderated.

You know why icann doesn't like.web? Cause they know this tld has the potential to unseat.com as the king of tld's. And if that ever happens guess what? NSI and register.com's ".COM" will be diluted, thus hurting nsi/register.com's bottom line.

For the sake of our future, I hope nsi gets knocked down for good. I mean, I still can't believe it's taken more than a year and they still can't give sex.com to the rightful owner. My god, the domain was stolen! How hard is that to figure out?

Where do you see a typo? Looks fine to me and if you do a 'dig . ns' while resolving from the correct root (ie: Not the deprecated Legacy Root operated by ICANN) you'll see everything come up just fine.
So again, where do you see the typo? Or are is your brain just having dificulty understanding normal, everyday, standard DNS?

It seems really stupid to go around giving out monopolies on particular TLDs.

Not the way ICANN set this up. What they wanted was not suggestions for new TLDs, but new monopoly registrars (for new TLDs, but with the fact of them being reisgtrars being more important than the TLDs in question.)

so what was the problem with registering a.bc.ca or.ab.ca. I know that's possible, and frankly what's wrong with that?

The problem with.com is that it assumes that your organisation is the only one with that name in the entire world.

Now how stupid is that? It's basically only true for Pepsi and such. A software developer in Canada that has a presence in only one province is unlikely to meet that criteria. At least the (unfortunately replaced).ca system wouldn't run into the problem of cybersquatters as quickly.

IOD is not "pre-registering" names. They are "registering" names just like Jon Postel told them to go ahead and do - and charge money for it - at a meeting at IANA in the late 90's. Michael Gerstand and Simon Higgs were also at that meeting.

I've always thought that the violation of the TLDs is what we don't want. Things like organizations using.net's and commercial using.org's. Wouldn't this type of thing stop the confusion or am I missing something here?

No company willing to shell out that much money for a domain name will ever buy.biz . Not only does.biz not have as high a profile as.com , but it also looks really stupid. I can't imagine running foocorp.biz instead of foocorp.com .

Everyone will just register their name in all of them (corporations will anyway). If there are 16 available
TLDs, does anyone here NOT think Coca-Cola will register coke.xxxx in all of them (plus coca-cola.xxxx, diet-coke.xxxx, etc.)?

The sort of thing Network Solutions encourages people to do. The only solution would be something to the effect that this kind of "cybersquatter" can lose all their domain names.

Yup, this is true. And then it will become apparent that dot-com has gone through the same long, slow slide into the mud as Usenet. And both will continue to be useful for those who would rather work to filter out the dreck than be spoon-fed.

Unfortunately, the masses prefer to be spoon-fed. Don't think the goal isn't to coax them into pods someday - until Neo comes.

" dot-com is main street Slicon Valley and Wall Street [ny/ny] combined. Any other
dot-ohheckimtoolateoricantaffordthedotcom has minute survival chances in a market that is hooked on
dot-com. "

So, dot net doesn't mean anything to you?

Commerce via the telephone has not died out;
and relatively few telephone-based businesses
use mnemonics for their phone numbers. Why is
name dot com so important? If it were not for
the finite resource of the IP address (forcing
many web domains to share them, now and more so
in the near future), we could happily go to numeric addressing. The high profile that DNS
gets today could shift to directory services.
It's already such a mess that you can't ever assume a company's name dot com is the address
for that company. And there are many whose coporate site does not even host the sales and
support site, so, all this hype is over something
that's not even as useful as it could be.

If you can't afford $2,000, there will always be companies that will sell you a "third level" domain name for much less. For instance, I can register something like johnscanoes.com or for less money, I can go to a company like DreamHost and get johnscanoes.dreamhost.com for much less.

In fact, the high price tag of.biz might cause a resurgence of the "internet mall" idea...lots of small commercial operations all running of a similarly themed.biz domain name....like canoes.biz screwdrivershop.biz, etc.

No they are protected by governments (plural). Problem is that there is one country which dislikes using it's geographic TLD. Whilst coka-cola.us (or even coka-cola.un) might legitimatly indicate a registered tradmark coka-cola.com/coka-cola.net/coca-cola.org/etc clearly does not.

And will a tld like.biz really mean extra space? Costing what
they do, mostly established companies and companies with a bunch of cash will buy domain names. These same companies will already own the same.com name or buy it at
the same time. While it is technically extra space, I think we will mostly see the same names registered to both.com and.biz.

There is a simple solution. However it is probably not politically correct to ICANN. That is to make ownership of a.com and a.biz domain mutually exclusive. Allow a period of time for migration, but if after that they don't give up one of them they lose both (and must may twice the cost of the most expensive to get either one of them back.)

Well think about it. If someone has 1800Flowers.com trademarked do you think a FTD can have 1800flowers.biz?

If they trademark were registered in a sane part of the world then they probably could, but couldn't have 1800Flowers.com.biz. It's simply a question of what the trademark is and if such a tradmark would meet the criteria for registration in the first place.

The only real solution is to drop.com,.net,.org &.gov. by mapping back to.us space.

There is a rump of legitimate.com. That is companies which operate internationally. There is no such situation with.gov, since there is already a.un TLD. There might be a very small number of legitimate.edu, probably mostly in Easten Europe...

When I registered a domain name for my employer (a Canadian software developer for the
health care market) I looked into registering a.ca domain, but this was impossible because the Canadian government has restricted.ca's to registered corporations with
branch offices in two or more provinces.

So instead you could have..ca reasonably sensible. IMHO the problem isn't so much that you couldn't get a name in.ca, but that anyone could. As opposed to the Canadian corporations having something like.co.ca,.com.ca,.corp.ca, etc.

Too late. The horse is already outside the barn. Dot-com is the Kikkoman of domain names and I wouldn't want to do.biz-ness with any company that hasn't had the foresight to reserve their.com.

IMHO the system is foobar... I feel sorry for folks trying to think up new company names, or who are a little late to the Internet biz (oops, I said it:) ). I mean when "telefunken-u47.com", "elvisconspiracy.com", and "liquorinthefront.com" are all taken, can the end of civilization be far behind?

Luxury domain names should have been reserved years ago, and the extra revenue (if any) used to fund IP multicast research or something useful...

Oh, it doesn't break the rules. But it is a joke. Watch the presdent's analist some time (a good movie). I wasn't involved with the naming, but I talked to the folks who did it. Hell, UUNET wan't a phone compony at the time, it was all that much more amusing to me then.

Its a very intreasting project

No, a quite dead project. But still intresting.

Er, unless this is a new use of TPC.INT, the original use was FAXing. Drat, now that I read your RFC that's not the one. Try RFC 1528, 1529, and 1530, and also www.tpc.int...whih of corse claims to be not currently dead. But the history section says it was dead in 1994, which is what I recall.

1) Sale of all subdomains of these TLDs should be halted
2) Subdomains of.us should be created for each...
3) Existing.com/etc domains created under.com.us/etc. I guess we have to let them keep their exiting domains though 8-(
3) Leave it upto the naming authorities in each geographics TLD as to which subdomains they wish to create/for what price etc.

This is how it *should* have been from the start... nice and clean... like any good filesystem/home directory 8-)

Si

ps. No... I'm not joking... fair play to the yanks for coming up with this Internet malarkey, but these domains are a pants idea.

Does Anyone remember when the internet was not commercially focused, when it was about making actual information available? It may just be me, but it struck me that the whole focus of ICANN seems to be not so much how to regulate the domainspace, but how to generate more cash out of it. I would be *so* happy to see the development of an entirely non-commercial internet where I could go to seek bona-fide information free of advertisements, commercial interests, etc.

I have developed and maintained my own website (Omphalos - The Directory & Search Engine for Paganism & Witchcraft [omphalos.net]) and expanded it to provide a wide variety of information on its subjects, and it has a growing audience (~40,000 page views per month). I have done so without any thought of making a profit from the site. My only purpose is to try to provide some useful information to others out there who might be interested in the topics covered by my website. There are many other websites out there which have the same purpose and their developers have put the same sort of time into their sites as I have into mine I am sure. We are all being lost in a sea of increasing commercialization on the web. I regularly see the assumption made that if you are on the web, and own your own domain you are naturally doing so for the purpose of making money and therefore can naturally afford the costs associated with any new requirements that spring up. When renewal time for Omphalos.net rolls around I can certainly afford the $75 required, but not if they were allowed to raise the rate to $2000. Can anyone see NSI claiming that since.biz domains go for $2000 they ought to be able to raise the rate on.com domains? I can. Therefore, I fear that it might not be all that long before the relentless drive to turn a quick buck might drive me out of my own domain space entirely.

And yes, I should probably register Omphalos.info as soon as I can, but what will it cost me?

No company willing to shell out that much money for a domain name will ever buy.biz .

Wrong. Companies which consist of something more than hype will _LOVE_.biz. You know, a place for buyers and sellers to do business and to look for business without an endless stream of fuckedcompanies.com getting in the way. B2B sites. Serious career classified sites. Music archives for people who dont mind paying and can do without 10 banners/page, thank you very much. If the barrier to entry in.biz for Venusian Crystals and Vitamins, Inc. is too high, the world is a better place. The new tlds will improve the internet. The only people icann is disappointing are the idiot opportunists who ruined the.com space to begin with.

See, no one needs a dozen new.com's. One is enough. Why two? Are we all out of.com prefixes? Has Joe Pr0n out of words or something? Last I checked fatchickswithstringytits.com wasnt taken. Neither was naked-30yr-old-teens.com. I'm sure there are others.

You know, I expected icann to go the other way and pander to rampant commercialism. Instead, they've gone the other way. This is a good thing. All of you out there who were using the net before W95 came out, before it became a rage, before it was coopted by this maddening surge in venal pop culture, all of you will undoubtedly remember it to be a better place.

You want art?.museum. You want to see Ingrid's photoshop accidents?.com. You want accurate information about any number of professions from law to medicine to engineering?.pro. You want to learn how to duct tape your ide cables?.com

You get the picture.

This is neither elitism the raving of a crotchety curmudgeon. This is, finally, an injection of fairness into the internet. I turned off the boob tube a long time ago. I dont want to have to yank the cable modem too.

This seems like the perfect system to actually free up many of the domain names used now. Limit.com to actual commerical entities,.net to actual ISPs and the like,.org to actual organizations...and then create another TLD for everything else, free of trademarking disputes and the like. I'm surprised that trademark considerations haven't been mentioned with the new TLDs, considering the fact that Dr. Joe Ford can now acquire ford.pro...

Make that rule, and you'll find that every corporation spins off a new division, separately incorporated, to hold the.biz domain. Or you'll find brother-of-owner holding the.biz domain. And so on.

Which will be expensive for the corporation, especially since all of the most obvious kinds of evasion would immediatly place them in breach of contract. (i.e. they'd loose their.com domain straight away.)

...that are the reason why small businesses struggle during their first years of operations. I run a LEGITIMATE business online and off, and I resent your comments. There ARE other people in the world besides Oracle, Nike, and Pepsi, and just because we aren't known world-wide doesn't mean that we are flim-flam artists.

$2000 up front IS a lot of money for most small businesses, especially those just starting up (like mine) Nevermind the fact that it's tax-deductible, it's still a steep fee and I am sure it's just another way for INTERNIC and others to capitalize on other businesses' success. I am for real, I work hard, and I spend my advertising budget in places that will give me the most bang for my buck. That is why I'll never be a.biz until they lower those fees.

I can see through this exactly. A bunch of large companies using government controls to create an elite version of the internet. THEY DONT LIKE THE FACT THAT MY WEBSITE LOOKS LIKE THEIR $3 MILLION SITE. They need a way to keep the small peeps out. They will then vilify the.com addresses as a place where fraud and abuse occur. Only the new domains are the *safe* place to be. Watch and see.

I don't think it will matter how many TLDs they come out with. Everyone will just register their name in all of them (corporations will anyway). If there are 16 available TLDs, does anyone here NOT think Coca-Cola will register coke.xxxx in all of them (plus coca-cola.xxxx, diet-coke.xxxx, etc.)? The.pro sounds like a step in the right direction, but I seriously doubt they will care too much if you have the cash. How many companies that aren't ISPs are network providers have.net for example?

I tend to agree with you, but putting museums into.edu really doesn't solve the problem of deciding whether this or that museum is "good enough" because the.edu requirements are extremely strict -- you have to be a US four-year degree granting institution to get into.edu. (I, like most H.P. Lovecraft fans, have always thought that setting up a fake web site for Miskatonic University under miskatonic.edu would be cool, but currently that's not possible)

I actually recommend complete freedom on TLDs, although I have yet to figure how I would administer it. Probably a sign up for as particulary TLD like each domain name now. and the TLD owner could charge or not charge for domain names in it as they saw fit. Competition would bring the prices down.

and you know that it would irk microsoft to have to pay for something like

.BIZ was first deployed by Karl Denninger around 5 years ago. I think he charged $25 or something. Karl subsequently sold MCS.NET and these days Leah Gallegos runs.BIZ. I think she charges about $6 with the idea that that's wholesale and anybody can be a "registrar" for somebody else or just grab domains for themselves. The URL is HTTP://WWW.BIZTLD.NET [biztld.net].

is because they are protected by the government. If trademarks were not protected by the law, each company could take on a variety of names instead of just one. Yes this may cause confusion at first becuase scumbag spammer types would use names that have nothing to do with the trademark but at the same time we would be making people more aware of the fact that this kind of thing may happen, and we could start an internet based blacklisting of individuals who are squatting or using names that are clearly meant to deceive the people.

Basically what I am saying is that we the people should be our own regulators. We don't need the government reulating what is legit or not, we the people are smart enough to do this thing on our own. Free intellectual property. Let the people decide what is a legitimate source of binary data over what is not. We are not kids anymore dammit, the government should give us this right. To not give us this right is an offense to our intelligence not to mention to the progress of the democratic world.

The ICANN board wanted multiple, DIFFERENT models for the domains they approved.
The battle between "chartered" and "open" models has been ongoing for years, and there was no way we wouldn't have both kinds.
I believe.info is the open one, while.museum and.coop both got good marks because there's a definite international organization that wishes to stand behind them with the approval stamp, like today's.edu and.gov.
The.name and.biz models are true experiments.

Ireland as well as Canada just dumped this silly ass idea; there are others but I don't remember them off the top of my head.

Exactly when did Ireland and Canada drop this stupid policy of allowing anyone (including non Canadian and non Irish) organisations to register in their name space.Where is the announcement of their returning to sensible policies. The problems with.com,.net,.edu &.org would be drastically reduced if their original restrictions had continued to be applied. i.e..com is a commercial business;.net is a networking organisation such as an ISP or NOC;.edu is some kind of school and.org is a non profit oganisation. Then apply the further restriction that these be international entities of these types.

I think the exact opposite. The internet is a global thing, and countries are only relevant if the services of a particular domain are targeted solely at one country.

At the moment no-one is checking this. With many companies using.com infact being very local (even to the point being subnational. Whilst major offenders here are in the US companies in other parts of the world have started to copy this behaviour.) Let alone the number of.com's which are something other than commercial organisations...

The whole point to this icann opening up new domains is to relieve the current shortage in easy-to-remember domain names.

Without addressing the reasons for the "shortage" in the first place, without wich simply creating new TLD's is unlikely to help. Indeed the "alternative DNS" appears to have more of a clue on how to run things.

The unfettered free-for-all is what has ruined the DNS namespace.
Mom-and-pop operations registering global.com names.

Dosn't help that places like Canada, which used to have sensible policies preventing this kind of thing, have recently dropped them

Multinationals registering every one of their product names as a *.com.

As well as in.org,.net. etc. Even though such companies may have many trading names, these are not usually synonymous with their product names.

Movie titles as domain names.

As well as TV programmes, film and TV characters, actors, bands, musicians, etc.Even when it's not uncommon for films and TV series to carry different titles in different places.

All these things suck.

They suck from the POV of people trying to use the result, not to the people who created it.

Better use of.cc domains (you merkins have.us. Use it!)

For some reason admitting they are in the USA is a horrible concept for many US organisations. For the "mom-and-pop's" being mom-pop.ny.ny.com.us, even if they only do business in New York City appears to be just too upsetting.

As a side note, the problem with inability to deal with squatting of ".com" (.net,.org) addresses has to do with several registrars handling these. Competition for domain name registration is Good, but no single TLD should be in the hands of more than one registrar. Why? Because they will compete for customers by lowering their prices - if one entity managed it they could actually increase the prices for registration based on the current shortage.

...

The price tag of $50000 for a TLD application filtered out common sense, and left only money left to speak. Bad idea.

Let me get this stright, charging a lot for a domain name is a good idea, but charging a lot for a TLD is a bad idea?

It was brought to my attention that these names may be a test of sorts:

Perhaps they're truing to experiment. They've picked some very specific domains such as aero, some vague ones such as.info, some "jazzy" ones such as.biz... to see how each prosper?

In that case, the adding of domains for the actual good of the Internet
will be round 2.

If that's the case, then how long is ICANN going to study the response (which I think probably will (or should:) be negative) before having a next round of name declarations?

Alternately, what about the possibility of going around DNS? Are there any alternative systems that could be opened up? I seem to remember one called X-something-or-other, but damn if Google won't show it to me with that...:)

Up front, I think ICANN has a tough job trying to please everyone. The logical result of such an attempt is that ICANN will never please anyone.
So, no matter what they do, nobody will ever be satisfied.

Next, new TLDs in any shape or form are useless.
The name of the game is dot-com.

dot-com is main street Slicon Valley and Wall Street [ny/ny] combined. Any other dot-ohheckimtoolateoricantaffordthedotcom has minute survival chances in a market that is hooked on dot-com.

Therefore, all new TLDs will only result in a land-grab of imbeciles and in money burning from doomed start-ups.

Would you do business with a company that doesn't have a dot-com? Maybe to buy chewing gum [caffeine] or an auction, well if it's cheap, you might. But would you buy thousands of dollars woth of goods from someone that can't be bothered to buy their dotcom domain?
Would you trust an online service provider or consultant that doesn't have his/her dotcom? Just how valuable could that service be, if the provider didn't even have the foresight to secure his/her dotcom?

So, who would take a domain, like say, dotbiz?
People who can't afford the dotcom, right? Why would I want do business with them? If they were reliable and successful, then the owner of the dotcom would have sued them out of their dotbiz by now, claiming 'prior art' and bad business practice.

Further, there are so much more dotcom domains available than meets the eye. heck, there are over 400 languages in use on the planet and the English name space is coming up with creative new terms [i-this, e-that, 1-more, 2-less, 1-4-u, etc.] on a regular base. So by adding new domain names, thgis creativity would be stifled for a short while, until everyone realizes that new TLDs didn't solve a problem, but created severl. Then we'll all be back to inventing new words and phrases like i_1_2_yell.com. Apart from that English is probably the language that assimilates new and foreign language words the easiest.
So, we are unlikely rto really ever run out of dotcom names.

Of course, the no-brainer names for people who have problems to articulate in their first language will be incresing in price on an ongoing base. But so what? Does it affect anyone here if someone makes a gazillion for iknewitfirst-dot-com? Aren't most people just pissed off that they didn't do it themselves, when they hear about a cybersquatter making a killing?
I think, there should be laws against taking someones dotcom brand and registering similar names only to sell it back to the original owner.

Remember the first guys that registered a go2...-dotcom? I think they should own the rights to all domain names that have a go2 in them. They had the idea first and should have the right to claim 'prior art'.

But they can't, because they are a bunch of young techies that had no idea what gold-mine their idea could be. Then came Go2Networks, snapped them all up, sold out to Disney and recently the people who can demonstrate that they registered the first ever domain name that had go2 in it received a letter from WIPO...

So, coming full circle, while Slashdotters love to trash issues, it seems that most of them miss the point. Copyrights, Open Source, Domain names, Legal system, they all fit in the same catgory - "things to be urgently reviewed"

While I do not share the script kiddies' hostility towards ICANN/M$/Business/their-mum, I do think that ICANN completely missed the picture [again]as well and tried to solve a problem that didn't really exist by isolating incidents and studying them in an artificial surrounding - the best recipe for questionable scientific results.

Instead of yelling and raining mayhem, Slashdotters should have combined forces and mailed ICANN when they first said that new TLDs will be introduced. Instead of isolating the fact that big-bad-corp is likely to benefit, we should have tried to explain to ICANN why it is they are missing the point and what potential damage they might cause.

Sure, we should have a dotsex or dotxxx and then make it law that adult material has to be on those TLDs. Would be so easy to please everyone, if people would put their heads together and talk instead of bumping them all the time.
If dotsex was the law, no dotcom would be permitted to ever display any adult material whatsover - and it even fits with the first ammendment...

I can not see any solution to the problem - which wasn't really there until everyone tried to fix it aprt from a drastic one that would require a complete system overhaul.

Unless IE6, 7 or 8 has it's own embedded system that resolves any type of entry to the closest matching IP [provided IPv6 is widely spread to permit huge numbers of new IPs]; and that our 24/7 connections are fed the latest IP updates on an ongoing base, dot-com will be Fifth Avenue and everything else will be slums.

All this is a good thought, but ICANN has screwed the pooch (or the average person in this case).

The TLD will compete not only by offering extra space, but additional prestige: dot-biz domains will cost $2,000 to register and $150 to maintain.

The higher price means that only serious registrants will be getting dot-biz domain names.

So, someone who can't afford the higher price is automatically considered as a registrant that is not serious? And will a tld like.biz really mean extra space? Costing what they do, mostly established companies and companies with a bunch of cash will buy domain names. These same companies will already own the same.com name or buy it at the same time. While it is technically extra space, I think we will mostly see the same names registered to both.com and.biz.

If they were really serious about alleviating the shortage of domain names, they would have provided a tld for the average person and/or business.

The new TLDs serve only *one* purpose: to make money for the registrars. There's obviously no logic in the choices for the new TLDs (except that they attempted to spread the wealth evenly) due to the limited use that the new names innately have (I'm sure they're just tons of.museums out there), with.biz being the exception.

Ah, but they haven't left out TM's at all. Every proposed TLD has both a sunrise provision for TM holders and adopts the flawed UDRP.

All they have done is hand it over to the megacorps, just like they've done with.com/net/org. They haven't opened up the name space one bit. The individual dn holder is still screwed and Joe Ford would have to prove he's a professional to get the name. Nothing's changed except maybe the price goes up.

The.BIZ tld that has been in the ORSC rootzone is $6.00 and has one restriction. You can't transfer it. - i.e., don't register it if you intend to sell it, 'cause you can't. The same goes for.online and.etc. - all $6.00.

The idea is to open up the name space and give everyone a chance. There is no UDRP. It will take a court order to lose the name, and then the only choice is deletion (cancellation). No transfer. No supra legal body to take the name away. You register it, you use it.

But! Here's another twist... It is finally up to DoC as to whether ANY of them are entered into the legacy root. Don't forget that. It ain't over yet. There are already challenges from Congressmen - probably more coming.

If you want freed up name space, you're gonna have to go to the ORSC root system. It's like it should be....:)

I had hope when ICANN was founded. When I saw that there was a FEE just to PROPOSE new TLDs, I was shocked, but thought, "Well, they have to get funding somewhere, I suppose." Then I learned that whoever recommended the accepted new TLDs got a lock (like NSI had up to a year ago) on the TLD, I was angered. Where went the idea of opening up the net? Then I learned they shot down two of what I felt to be the most important TLDs;.kids and.sex or.xxx. There could have been a lot of good done with.kids, and.sex or.xxx would have helped separate the.coms from the.cums out there. Now this. This is insane. Since I'm a professional, not a corporate entity on my own, I should be able to register a.pro for myself if I WANT to, I shouldn't have to pass some moron's arbitrary judgement.

It's official, ICANN is useless.They're just as useless as they were before they made any decisions.

It is hard to know where to start. The idea that there is no problem with DNS is fairly mad; I assume you haven't been paying attention for the last three years.

The problem of.com,.org etc is nothing to do with the globalness or otherwise of the owners, it is to do with creating enough namespace for smithsbooks.co.uk and smithsbooks.co.us to exist without smithsbooks.com automatically capturing 90% of all people trying to get the website of their local bookshop. It is this that forces companies outside the US to buy [mywebsite.co.ccTLD] and also [mywebsite.co.COM] (and now they also need to buy [mywebsite.BIZ)], which further pollutes the namespace.

I note that telephone numbers style URLS would work without lawyers getting involved or Nike leaning on people running Greek mythology websites, or McDonalds being given ownership of the name McDonald on a global basis and tough shit if you're Scottish.

As.com gets more and more
saturated,.com itself will naturally split into subdomains, run by whoever owns the domain, and competing amongst themselves
by price and services (It's already happening, really).

Where is it happening already? Why would it work if it did? Do you think the public generally know what to do if they type [siteIwant].com into their browser and get [siteIdontwant].com? Are you suggesting that they'll automatically try [siteIwant].someISP.org and then [siteIwant].someotherISP.org etc. until they get the right one? Is that what you call a working DNS?

I know plenty of people who have registered.EDU domains without being an accredited 4-year institution. Someone once told me that I'd have a hard time getting a.net domain without being an ISP. And, though I'm not a commercial entity (though credit card companies seem to think I am!), I had no problems getting a.com either.